Fighting soon erupted throughout the fleet.
Hordes of bizarrely shaped xenos creatures boarded Abaddon's fleet.
Even the Vengeful Spirit was no exception.
Strange crystals bored through the hull, while the wreckage of the dead Bio-fleet seemed to tear at the ships with sharp teeth under some unseen control.
The flickering crystals and bio-ships left Abaddon's Plague Fleet unable to defend against their attacks.
As squads of Cultists and Rebels arrived in the invaded sections with weapons in hand, fear welled up within them, despite all the daemons they had seen.
Their attackers were the Sslyth, previously hunted by the Imperium's Black Templars.
These creatures native to the Ghoul Stars were exceedingly strange. After examining their corpses, the Imperium's Biologis Sages had classified them as Crystallids.
Their bodies seemed to consist of some unique, warped crystalline substance, with humanoid frames and reverse-jointed legs.
Their hands bore sharp crystalline claws, and their faces were hideous.
Their appearance seemed to embody the twisted daemons of everyone's worst nightmares.
An eerie light shone from deep within their bodies.
The Sslyth appeared to communicate through peculiar pulses produced by this light, while the vocal structures in their heads emitted strange, horrifying shrieks.
These xenos creatures were fast, immensely strong, and intensely aggressive.
Their sturdy crystalline bodies possessed a peculiar trait shared by most creatures native to the Ghoul Stars: they could shift between corporeal and incorporeal states.
To mortal eyes, these hellish fiends often vanished without warning, then flashed into existence before someone and instantly disemboweled them with their claws.
Many projectile weapons were remarkably ineffective against the Sslyth.
Even the Boltguns wielded by the Astartes were merely effective weapons against these xenos.
The Astartes' reflexes, however, allowed them to counter the native creatures' ambushes and strike lethal blows as their bodies changed state.
A